- What I came today to talk about
was a typical year keeping bees.
And here we are in February, and I looked at the temperature here
a few minutes ago.
We're at 3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Looks like minus three tonight.
For us, I hate to say it,
but that's terrific bee killing weather.
But, in any event, I'm going to give you an overview of what
happens throughout the course of the season,
what our bees are doing, and then also
what the beekeeper is doing.
Kind of give you that sense of what happens throughout the
course of the year.
As was mentioned, my family and I,
we own and operate Capital Bee Supply, which is a
equipment manufacturing company for beekeeping equipment.
We primarily serve backyard and hobby beekeepers
throughout the U.S. and kind of
specialize in that backyard and hobbyist market.
You didn't get hard copies of the presentation,
but we do have copies of this presentation, other ones,
out on our website.
If you go to the resources section on the website,
you can find all those things out there along with a lot of
other informational handouts related to keeping of bees.
So, a little bit of background.
Why people keep honeybees, why we keep honeybees.
There's several different reasons why we do this.
One reason is for pollination.
A lot of people are interested in trying to improve the
pollination of their fruits and vegetables in their gardens.
Honeybees, as a managed pollinator,
are terrific at that.
You don't want to also forget about most of the native bees
that are in Wisconsin.
There's hundreds of species of those as well.
But the reason that people manage bees,
like European honeybees, is for pollination.
Also for honey.
The European honeybees are a social insect,
and as a social insect in that colony environment,
they are producing honey for the purpose of
trying to survive the winter.
It becomes one of their food sources in the winter
when other flower sources aren't available.
European honeybees produce surplus honey.
And so we collect that surplus honey over and above what they
need to survive the winter and consume it,
utilize it for ourselves.
Beeswax is another product out of the hive.
Beeswax has been something historically used for lots of
different purposes.
For candle products, for lighting, for toilet bowl rings,
for coatings on candies, for lots of stuff throughout history
that beeswax has been used for.
Waterproofing agents.
And there's other things that come from the hives as well.
Royal jelly and propolis.
Royal jelly is actually a secretion of the nurse bees.
They use it to feed developing larvae.
It's kind of like a milky substance.
A very complex chemical format, formula for it.
And then the other thing the bees are collecting and
generating in the hive is propolis.
Propolis is a sticky substance It is literally the bees going
out and collecting tree resins and saps.
And they bring that back to the hive,
and they use it seal up cracks in the hive.
They use it to glue things together in the hive.
The other thing about propolis that's quite interesting and
more and more research is going into it now is it has antibiotic
and antiseptic properties to it.
And there's certain things that the bees do,
certain situations wherein the bees will propolis things that
enter into their hives.
So, for instance, let's say a mouse gets into a hive.
The bees, in defending that hive,
they may decide to sting that mouse.
In the process, they may kill that mouse.
They don't physically have a way
to remove that mouse out of the hive.
So one thing they can do is encase it in propolis.
And by encasing it in propolis,
that keeps the bacteria and everything else contained
so it doesn't contaminate the rest of their hive.
So we have those basic products from the hive,
but then there's a lot of other reasons why people keep bees.
For enjoyment, for enlightenment, for education.
I tell people that I'm probably in the 12th year of my five-year
plan to know everything about honeybees. [laughter]
It's a constant learning curve to it.
Just when you think you have it figured out, something changes.
And there's, I think you hear it in other areas as well,
but there's two words
that beekeepers should get away from using.
And that's always and never because just when you say those
two things something changes on you.
So, they're very interesting insects to work with,
and we get a lot of enjoyment and enlightenment from them.
So, the way I think of the season, right now,
here we are in February, and I kind of lump December, January,
and February together in terms of what the honeybees are doing
and what the beekeepers has to do.
What the bees are doing is they're in a winter cluster
right now.
They don't really hibernate. They're active.
But they're definitely slower activity than what they'd be
during the normal course of the year.
They start to cluster somewhere around 57 degrees Fahrenheit.
And what the cluster is, essentially,
the bees in the hive, they are forming a ball
around the queen in the hive.
The hive has one queen.
They form this ball around her.
It's kind of a protective environment.
They are heating that center of the ball.
It can be anywhere upwards of 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Trying to keep that queen nice and warm in there.
The outer part of this ball of bees forms an insulating layer.
And depending upon how big the colony was going into winter,
that insulating layer could be from one to three inches thick.
That outer mantel of bees then is what's retaining the heat.
So the bees don't heat the interior of the hive.
They're heating the cluster.
And the way that they generate the heat is by taking and
vibrating their flight muscles.
They can detach their wings, essentially,
from their flight muscles.
Literally, it's almost like a crude form of shivering,
if you want to think of it that way.
But that's what they're doing
in trying to keep that queen nice and warm.
And, also, in some cases, they're trying to raise new bees
in the center of that early in the year as well.
In addition to kind of forming this cluster on the queen to
protect and warm her, the other purpose of that is to try to
keep the honey, they have to stay in contact with honey
during this time, keep that honey warm enough that they can
also consume it.
So, even in these very extreme cold temperatures,
if there's enough thermal mass in the cluster,
the bees can move about in that hive.
It's a very slow movement as a ball of bees,
but they can migrate around in there.
When you look at things like thermal images in the hives--
So what you see here is some different thermal images of
what's going on.
This is three hives standing up here
in the upper left-hand corner.
You can kind of see where the bees are kind of clustered up
high in this one.
This one it looks like they may be down low.
Once in a while
strange things happen in hives where
the clusters actually split.
So, for instance, if you get a warm spell and the bees decide
to make a major move in the hive,
they have to break cluster to kind of move horizontally around
in here, around frames and stuff,
but they can move vertically fairly easily.
But if they do break cluster in warm weather, once in a while,
if it starts to cool off really fast, they get separated.
So sometimes you have some bees isolated in one part and some
bees isolated in another part, which is not a great situation.
In the upper right-hand corner here,
this is actually an infrared image of the cluster itself.
And right about in here is where the queen bee is.
So you can kind of see fairly hot temperatures in here,
and then cooling around the perimeter.
These outer bees are actually cycling in to the center.
So they cycle in on about a one- to three-day cycle to replenish
and get some food and stuff like that.
And then they bees in the center,
some of those move out to actually form the insulating
layer around the perimeter.
So it's pretty amazing how they do this.
For most backyard and hobby beekeepers,
they're wintering their bees in place.
Their hives are out wherever they had them over the course
of the foraging season, and that's where the bees stay.
This is actually one of our hives.
This is wrapped up with an insulating wrap,
and it's also sitting on a scale.
But we winter our bees in place.
There's a whole other aspect of beekeeping which is the
commercial and especially the migratory beekeepers.
Those folks are moving bees to warmer climates in the winter,
unless they're really far north.
Some of the large commercial beekeepers in Canada,
they actually winter sometimes in wintering buildings,
special built buildings.
Some of the beekeepers, the large commercial beekeepers in
Idaho will be moving bees or have already moved bees in to
the potato cellars and will be moving those out shortly.
But it's a whole different thing when it comes to that side,
but for most hobby and backyard beekeepers,
they're trying to winter their bees right in place.
And it is doable.
There's definitely some challenges,
but it's completely doable.
So what's happening in terms of inside the hive population-wise?
We're at a time of year now where the number of bees inside
the hive is about just coming out of its lowest,
which happens somewhere around January.
We're probably around 10,000 to 12, 000 bees
in the hive at this point, along with that queen.
All the bees in the hive at this point are predominately female.
The male bees generally most of them get evicted in the fall.
And in a good situation, most of the hive is
at most about 10% male bees.
But because they aren't foragers,
because their sole purpose in life is to go out and mate with
virgin queens, they're not really needed in the winter.
So they do get evicted out, most of them.
Not 100% always, but most of them get evicted out.
This is actually a photo from one of our hives that died out.
This was taken about mid-January.
These bees were actively raising new bees.
So we'll talk a little bit about the winter bees and
how they have to survive longer.
But starting right after the winter solstice,
they usually start raising some new brood.
The queen starts laying a small number of eggs,
and they're raising replacements.
So what we see here in some of these cells are eggs,
and then we have developing larvae.
Over in here there's some cat brood in here.
And these bees here that are head down in the cells,
these were heater bees.
They were trying to kind of keep this area around in here warm.
It's one way, and as part of the cluster,
that they'll do this.
They'll have some open cells that they can cluster down into
to try to generate warmth,
in addition to being between the frames.
So they do start fairly early, even though on a very small
scale, laying, raising out new bees.
At this point, they may be only raising a few hundred
replacements at a time versus in the peak of the season,
the queens could be laying
on the order of 1,000 to 1,400 eggs a day.
So it's a big change.
But right now things are a lot slower.
So, for the beekeeper,
it's also a little bit slower time of the year.
What we're trying to do is we're trying to make sure we're giving
our bees the best chance they have to make it through this
next push of the winter and into early spring.
We're checking food reserves.
When we go into winter in this part of the world,
we like to have somewhere between 60 and 100 pounds of
honey left with the bees.
Anything over and above that, we may have already harvested off
and typically do.
The other thing that we're doing is we're monitoring moisture
levels in those hives.
As the bees respire off, they're respiring warm, moist air.
That warm, moist air comes up and it condenses on the first
cold surface it hits inside the hive,
which is usually the cover up above them.
And when it condenses, it rains back down on them,
and wet bees are dead bees.
So there's a certain amount of ventilation or a certain amount
of preparation that's done to try to modify where that cold
surface is or try to limit the amount of moisture in the hive.
They need some moisture in the hive, but too much is bad.
The other thing we're doing is we're getting new equipment
ready for spring, and we're also trying to learn more ourselves
and figure out what we did bad, what we did good
in the previous year.
A lot of the beekeeping meetings happen on the state and national
level this time of year.
And so those are the things we're doing.
So this is an example of emergency feeding in the winter.
What we have here is we have granulated sugar.
This is granulated sugar that's been put on a piece of wax
paper.
This was done on a colony that was short on honey or they had
consumed most of their honey, and I was concerned they were
gong to be in trouble.
This gives them something they can come up into and you can
kind of see this cluster of bees kind of working on this
granulated sugar in there.
This is an example of moisture problems in a hive.
This cover is just saturated underneath here.
And, again, that's bad news in a colony.
If it rains down on them, wet bees, dead bees.
And there we are kind of working on some equipment,
trying to get all of our boxes and things together for the year
and frames and all the stuff we need to do.
One of the things that's nice about beekeeping is that it can
be multigenerational.
We have two daughters, one that's 10 right now,
one that's six.
Both of them started working with us with bees
when they were three or four years old.
And we try to get them involved in many different aspects of it.
But they don't necessarily have to work with bees
if they don't want to.
There's lots of other things they can do in terms of painting
and trapping and doing other things like that.
So December, January, February:
that kind of winter cluster season.
As we get into March and April, things start to kind of pick up
a little bit more in terms of what the bees are doing.
So the overwinter colonies, the ones that survived are starting
to build up.
They've been raising replacements.
Now, they're getting ready in anticipation of spring flowers.
When you start keeping bees, you become even more in tune
sometimes to what's going on in the phenology
and the flowering year.
What happens is the bees have to be about 45 days ahead of when
they think flowers are going to start blooming because it takes
45 days from the time that an egg is laid to the time that you
have a foraging bee that's able to fly out into the environment
and actually collect nectar and pollen.
So they're 45 days ahead.
And this makes a very risky time of year for them because they're
trying to raise a lot of new bees.
They're consuming resources in the hive,
and there's very very little, if anything,
in the environment for them to go out and collect and utilize
right now.
So, this is a time of year when a lot of beekeepers start losing
bees to food shortages in the colonies.
We look at things like when the maple trees and when the maple
sap first starts to flow, that's about the first pollen that
becomes available for the honeybees.
If they can fly at this point, if the temperatures are in that
plus 40-50 degree range, they will be flying and they can go
out and collect pollen in that kind of circumstance.
But really, what we look at is when we start getting major
nectar flows.
And usually our first major nectar flow
is the dandelion bloom.
Dandelions, when they first bloom,
they're going to be about 50% to 55% sugar concentration
in the nectar.
As that flower fades,
that nectar sugar concentration drops.
But they're highly attractive to honeybees,
and when we talk to beekeepers, they'll talk about things in
terms of honey flows.
And dandelions are one of the first honey or nectar flows that
we usually see around here to start out the year.
So, our populations are now starting to increase.
We're starting to get into a situation where we're probably
running strong with 20,000 bees in the hive,
basically double from what we had coming out of January and
February.
And they're going to start ramping up significantly
from here.
Other things that are going on
in terms of what the beekeeper is doing.
While the beekeeper is cleaning up and trying to fix up the
things and learn from the things that died out,
we also are starting new colonies.
There's many ways to do this, but one way to do it is to use
package bees.
And then we're also doing our routine inspections now.
The weather is warmer, we can start to get into the
hives and start to look at our bees more carefully and see
what's going on.
So we're checking their disease and pest levels.
And pest in particular we're looking at are varroa mite,
varroa destructor, levels.
We're looking at our queen performance.
Again, those queens have to start ramping up and laying more
and more brood in order to make it through the season here.
So, if a queen is failing or she's having problems,
we'll start to see that population kind of not rising.
It's kind of leveling off.
So we're watching that.
And we're watching just the population of the colony
in general.
Making sure it's coming up.
And we're also getting ready for the honey flows.
We have to sometimes provide extra equipment,
extra boxes for the bees, so they have space to actually
store surplus honey.
So we're actively out there at this point starting to manage
for the honey flows.
So, just like the bees have to be ahead,
the beekeeper has to be a little bit ahead of these things
as well.
This is what a package of bees looks like.
Each one of these units here is a package.
In the spring of the year, starting about the end of March
through about the second week of May,
packages are imported into the state of Wisconsin for people
that want to start out new colonies or are expanding.
Most of these are coming from and have to come from
the warmer climate.
So they're coming from California,
they're coming from Florida, Georgia, Texas
because now this time of year, for instance in Florida,
you have the citrus bloom occurring.
In California right now, the almond bloom is occurring.
So their bees are ahead in terms of populations.
So what those beekeepers do is they sell off some of their bees
in these types of packages.
What's in here is, depending up on the size of the package,
anywhere from 4,000 to 7,000 bees, and also a queen.
There's a queen that's suspended in here inside a separate cage
inside this package.
The queen doesn't come from the same colony
that these bees come from.
But that's one of the ways that we start out.
There's just another image of a package,
what we would call a heavy package,
meaning that there's a lot of bees in that thing.
It's really loaded up, and that's what we want to see when
we buy them.
So, we go about getting ready to install bees.
We take these sticks of packages out.
We spray them down with a little bit of sugar syrup to make the
bees sticky so that they're not flying all over when we dump
them in the hive.
We pull the queen out, and we put the queen inside the hive,
in between a couple frames, because
the bees are keyed in to her.
And if they know that she's there,
they've been traveling with her, if they know she's there,
they will generally stay in that hive And then it's a process of
shaking the bees in there.
They get shook when the packages are made up, and they get shook,
in our case, when we dump them out.
And they're exoskeletal, so they're pretty tough
for the most part.
And we literally shake them right down in the hive,
and that's how we start a new colony.
It's one of the ways you can do it.
There are other ways to do it as well.
And then, we kind of let them alone for a while.
We'd generally be feeding them some sugar syrup.
And we start inspecting the colonies and going out and doing
our routine checks.
We usually check on a one- to two-week basis
to see how the bees are doing.
We're looking for diseases.
We're looking for population levels.
Depending upon the colony, we may be also sampling
for mite load.
A whole variety of things.
We look at the laying pattern of the queens.
And what we want to see is something like this.
If they're filling out frames nice.
This is all capped brood.
The queen laid eggs, the eggs hatched,
they went through five instars as larvae,
and then they get capped over, and then under this cap they
spin a cocoon and they pupate,
and 21-ish days later,
plus or minus, they emerge.
What you have here is capped brood.
Around this is a band of pollen,
or literally it's what we call bee bread.
It's actually pollen that the bees collect.
They add some enzymes to it, it ferments,
and that becomes bee bread,
which is used to feed developing larvae.
And then around this is capped honey.
And what they do is they keep their resources close
to where their brood nest is.
So there'll be several frames in the center of the hive,
like this, where they're raising out new bees.
So this is one of the pest we're looking for.
This is actually a varroa destructor mite.
Varroa mites came into the US in the 1980s,
have been a recurring problem all along.
But we test for mites on a routine basis.
We use powdered sugar roll to do that where we take a sample of
bees, we put them in a jar, we put powered sugar on them,
we shake them up with a cover, the screen cover on there,
and then that sample, what we'll do is we'll shake the powdered
sugar out and the mites dislodge from the grooming and from the
powdered sugar, making the bees harder to cling on to.
And then we count how many mites we have,
and we make decisions based on what our mite loads are in terms
of what we're going to do, if anything, in terms of treatment,
if we need to, for our bees.
So that kind of gets us going into the early spring,
and then we start into late spring/early summer.
So the bees now, at this point,
they're still growing in population.
We're getting larger and larger colony sizes.
The colonies are actively out there foraging.
Lots of flowers going now.
Lots of things for them to be into in the environment.
In addition to continuing foraging,
they also are starting to do something new.
And that is they're starting to raise drones and, in some cases,
starting to raise new queens.
So what we look at in terms of what's happening and how our
bees are doing, when we start to see the bees raise drones,
we know that's a sign that the season is right
that they could swarm.
And what swarming is is a colony level reproduction,
meaning the colony splits.
So our populations are really growing here.
And there comes kind of a critical mass where the bees
start to feel like they're overcrowded,
there's not enough space, they're bumping into everybody,
some of you gotta go.
And so what ends up happening, they're thinking about trying to
get some bees to move to somewhere else.
Again, they're foraging.
This is actually clovers, little clovers and stuff they're into.
Buckwheat that we plant for our bees.
Normally plant that for a later forage into August.
There they are in buckwheat flowers.
They'll be in mint.
They'll be in sweet clovers.
They'll be in alfalfa, if it's allowed to bloom.
They also like clovers.
The white, yellow blossom clovers All kinds of things out
in the environment that they're foraging in.
Canola.
This is up by Columbus.
Sometimes we have bees near some fields of canola.
It's not very common around here.
More common in the Dakotas and up into Canada you see big
fields of canola.
And there's lots of plants that the bees are interested in.
We have actually this out on the website,
or you can pick it up at our booth.
A whole list of plants and what they are largely for,
whether it's nectar, pollen, whether they're native or
introduced types of species as well.
In addition to being our foraging,
we're also in the time of year where the bees are actively
seeking water, especially as it gets warmer.
They need water for cooling in the hive.
They also need that water in some cases to reconstitute honey
if it's too dry.
So, one of the things about bees is that
they'll seek out water sources.
Sometimes they are water sources that are not where you want them
to be, like for instance a neighbor's swimming pool.
But they will seek out water through the course of the summer
as well.
And this is what they're doing.
They're developing nice frames of,
nice frames of capped honey for us.
So the beekeeper, at this point,
is still doing the routine inspections.
We're in that May, June, July timeframe.
We're watching our colony performance in the populations,
and we do manipulations to try to keep them from swarming.
We are either adding boxes, we are splitting hives,
we're reversing boxes, all in attempt to keep ahead of the
bees a little bit.
So this is what colonies start to look like
when they get really strong.
This has bees bearded on the front.
These are what we would call the brood chambers.
These are honey supers on top.
These are fairly strong colonies.
But when they get to this point, we have a risk of them swarming.
And this is what a swarm looks like.
In a swarm, what happens is that the old queen and roughly half
of the bees in the colony take off.
And they go out to find a new home.
Now, normally, the start of this looks something like this.
You'll see a giant cloud of bees,
and that cloud of bees will be flying around,
and ultimately they collect on something convenient at first.
Well, not always convenient, but sometimes convenient.
In this case, what they're doing
is they're collecting on a tree branch here.
And what's in this ball of bees is somewhere running around on
here is a queen, there's probably some drones,
there's a whole bunch of worker bees in here.
And what we try to do if we notice this happening,
if we didn't prevent it, we try to capture them.
And the process looks something like this.
We'll take, if it's convenient, we'll take a tree branch and cut
it or shake it into a box down below.
The trick with this is if we get the queen,
we will attract the rest of the bees in there.
And over time, those bees will migrate back in.
So this what it kind of starts to look like.
Let's see if this video will play a little bit for you.
I'll just have to scan it in here.
I thought it would play. I guess it won't play here.
But, in any event, what happens is that some of these bees are
actually standing out here on the landing board,
and they're fanning pheromone.
They have what's called a nasonov gland
on their back ends.
And what they're doing with that nasonov gland is they're fanning
pheromone out, and that attracts or tells the other bees, hey,
here's where our home is, come here.
And what you'll start to see is you'll start to see those bees
literally marching down into the hive.
So you know you've got the queen in there if the bees are
marching their way in.
And after about 20 or 30 minutes,
all you'll see is just some bees coming and going.
It's just as if nothing had happened,
if you get that queen in there.
If you don't get the queen, they'll probably swarm back out
of there again to somewhere else that you don't want them to be.
So, swarming is something we're trying to manage and trying to
keep from happening over the course of the summer months.
Which leads us into early fall.
Early fall, for us, is honey harvest season.
What we're doing is now we're going to go out and we're going
to collect honey off the hives, the surplus honey,
over and above what we think
they need to make it through winter.
And we're going to harvest that and take it.
So the colonies are starting to slow down now.
We're kind of on the downhill slide in terms of population.
They're still out there collecting nectar and pollen
from the early fall flowers, but it's a lot slower now
than what it had been.
And the bees are in the process of trying to make their final
push into the winter months now.
So here are in the downhill slide in terms of our
populations.
You can see we went from a peak of maybe 60,000 or,
in some colonies, 80,000 bees down here now to probably around
the 40,000-ish bees range.
So a pretty significant drop in our bee population
in those colonies.
So we're, ourselves, out there harvesting honey.
We're starting to check food reserves now
in anticipation of winter.
Anything that's a weak colony, we combine them together to try
to make strong colonies out of them because we want nice,
strong colonies to have enough thermal mass going into winter
and for overwintering.
So here we are.
This is just a line of hives.
We're kind of inspecting through here to see which ones we're
going to take honey off of, which ones we're going to leave.
The process of pulling honey off of hives involves getting the
bees driving out of these honey supers because we really don't
want these back in our extraction and bottling facility
So, what we do is there's different ways
to accomplish this.
You can blow them out with a bee blower.
You can fume them out
with a bee repellent sprayed on what's called a fume board.
Or you can use other types of devices, for instance, like,
triangle bee escapes, that are basically a maze.
And what this does is you set this under the box
you want to take.
The bees come down through.
They come out this triangular maze,
and by the nature of bees and the way that they walk around
and turn, they can find their way out but they have a hard
time finding their way in, at least for a day or two.
After a couple of days they'll figure it out.
But you can escape them out is another way to do it.
And so we get most of the bees out of there,
and we take those over into our kitchen facility and we uncap
the frames.
This is actually a frame of honey,
and we're using a hot knife here to try to uncap this.
And we collect all that cappings and also some of the honey that
drains out in the process because we'll keep that.
There's just a close-up of it with a hot knife.
You can also use cold knives and other things to do this as well.
And then we spin the honey out and extract her.
This is kind of what the process looks like.
Ourselves, what we do is we run our honey
through a double strainer.
We don't ultra filter it or anything like that.
We're just trying to get the big wax chunks out of there,
trying to get any incidental bee parts out of there,
those types of things.
And so there's kind of what the process looks like,
on a small scale, for getting honey out of there.
And then, ourselves, what we do is we bottle and sell honey.
So we bottle it in the kitchen,
and then off we go to farmer's market.
We're normally selling at the farmer's market during the
season from about mid-May through October
and talking to people about bees and selling honey.
In addition to the honey, we have to deal with wax
because we're uncapping frames
so that generates what we call cappings wax.
The other thing we have throughout the course
of the year that we collect is something called burr comb.
So we want the bees to build their comb,
their wax comb inside the frames.
Sometimes they build comb in places we don't want them to
build comb.
So we'll pull that out of the hive, and we keep it.
And then what we do is we melt it down.
This is actually a solar wax melter.
We put that material in a pan, and what happens is the solar
radiation takes and raises the temperature in here high enough
to melt the wax.
The wax runs down into these pans.
We put a filter cloth across the top
just to catch any of the debris.
You can see there's some bees, actually,
in this as well in here.
And we get nice, clean wax out of the process, more or less.
It looks kind of like that.
So, beeswax is something that we manage throughout the course
of the harvest season, as well.
So we get through August, September,
which is kind of our harvest season.
We've been kind of monitoring our bees,
making sure they're building up and everything's going good.
That takes us now back around
into October, November, and December.
So the bees now, at this point,
they're starting to raise their winter bees.
The difference between winter and summer bees is that the
winter bees have to live a lot longer.
These are the bees that are, for the bulk of them,
are going to have to make it from about November through
maybe March, somewhere in there.
So you're talking about bees that are going to have to live--
Well, November, December, January, February, March,
about four to five months, possibly,
depending upon the circumstances.
These bees are a little different in that what we're
trying to help here, what we're trying to get to here is to have
what we call fat bees.
We want to make sure our bees have enough resources
and enough nutrition that they build up fat stores.
Because they're going to have to survive these cold temperatures,
because they're going to have to be limited on the food they can
consume and what's available to them in the hive,
we want them to be nice and fat going into this period of time.
So our populations are really now in the down slope here
coming into, coming into late December.
Bees die off. They fall off.
They fall off onto the bottom boards of the hives.
Up to a certain point, you have housekeeping bees
that can carry those dead bees out.
After a while, the temperatures get too cold and the bees are
clustered up and they can no longer carry out the dead bees,
so they collect on the bottom of the hive.
What the beekeeper will do in the spring is do some clean-up
on those colonies to get those dead bees out of there for them.
And what we start doing in this late fall period of time,
early winter, is we feed colonies
that are short of honey.
We'll be feeding them what we call heavy syrup,
which is syrup that is two parts sugar to one part water.
And, in our case, if a colony is short on honey,
we'll be feeding them as much as they can physically take
to get them up to weight, to get them
into that 50 to 100 pounds of reserves for the winter.
And, in some cases, we may be also putting together our
emergency feed at this time.
Granulated sugar on top, fondant sugar cakes, candy boards,
all kinds of things you can do to give them surplus for when it
gets too cold, they cannot take liquid syrup.
They have to resort to something that's a hard candy
or a hard food of some sort.
The other thing we're doing is we're starting to get our bees
winterized, meaning that now we presumably
have them up to weight.
They have enough food reserves, either stuff they've collected
or stuff that we've helped them provide.
Now we give them a little extra protection.
It could be wind and weather protection.
There's lots of different opinions on what to do and what
not to do in colonies.
There's kind of a favorite line that goes around
in the beekeeping community:
ask 10 beekeepers, get 15 opinions
on what you should have done or didn't do
or didn't do right or should do tomorrow.
But that's just the nature of it.
There's lots of ways to keep bees.
So here we are.
This is actually heavy syrup.
In the spring, it's different.
When we're starting colonies out or if we're trying to provide
some extra resources for colonies in the spring,
we feed what's called light syrup,
which is one part sugar to one part water.
In some cases, we even go lighter than that.
We'll go to half to one.
Half part sugar to one part water,
which is more stimulative,
closer to what nectar actually is that way.
But this is two to one, or heavy syrup we call that,
we feed to the bees.
This is granulated sugar that's mixed up with a little bit of
water and some essential oils in there that we give the bees.
And then here we are.
Our colonies, depending upon what we're doing,
many of our colonies are wrapped up.
So these have got winter wraps on them.
We have ventilation devices on the top.
Lots of ways you can do it.
This is just one way that we go about it, anyway, for our bees.
So that kind of takes you through
the big pieces of the season and the kind of things that we do
and what's going on.
And I guess I will open it up for questions.
Thank you.
[applause]